Top Esports Turns to Veteran 369 After ZUIAN Fails Two US Visa Interviews for Worlds

Top Esports, one of the flagship franchises of Chinese League of Legends, spent Tuesday explaining how a visa problem has reshuffled its roster days before the game's world championship. In a statement posted in the afternoon — liked more than 16,000 times within hours — the club said starting top-laner ZUIAN had failed two in-person interviews for a United States visa and could not "travel with the team at the first opportunity." Veteran top-laner 369 — Bai Jiahao, who has played for TES and for JDG — joins the starting lineup in his place, while club and player pursue a third interview, and training plans and tactics are being rebuilt around the new five.

For Chinese applicants, an American visa means showing up in person, and the audience went straight to the arithmetic. A third interview this late, one widely shared post conceded, is "basically a last-ditch struggle" — the would-be starter would miss the first world championship of his career, "and I can't imagine how awful that feels." The commentator Wang Weichen put the roster math more bluntly: "US visa, failed twice. Applying for a third this late is a long shot. TES's Worlds top lane is basically 369 now" (he wrote).

369 had seen the scenario coming: weeks earlier he told stream viewers that if ZUIAN's visa did not come through, he would take the starting spot — "his words came true," one summary post noted. What the new starter had been doing instead of preparing became its own sub-plot. Fans found him streaming Valorant, the tactical shooter, where he is teaching himself the supportive "smoke agent" role — a Zhihu thread collects his early ranked matches, in which teammates assigned him the one agent he barely plays and the comment section let him have it. His stream logs show an October 4 session labelled "start practising smoke position." When a critic asked whether practising a single agent for a season was really so hard, the reply from the account behind the practice clips — TES-369 — became the story's punchline: "I really am practising, Brother Cat."

The S16 world championship is the biggest date on the game's calendar, and it requires China's teams to fly; the visa in question, commentators noted, is an American one. Two failed interviews leave the third attempt fighting the calendar — which is why the club's "third interview" language read to fans less as a plan than as a hope. ZUIAN waits on an embassy appointment. The team he was meant to anchor goes to the championship behind a veteran whose own week of visible preparation, as far as his streams show, has been happening in a different game entirely.